The news has broken: Clive Davis, the man who practically invented the modern music industry, has died at 94. British artists from Sir Paul McCartney to Adele have queued up to pay tribute to the “greatest producer,” but let us be honest: his real genius was not in the studio. It was in the boardroom.
Davis was a corporate titan who understood that music is a business, a fact that sentimentalists prefer to ignore. In an age when we mourn the death of “authenticity” and record labels are reduced to algorithms, Davis represented a lost world of shrewd deal-making and artistic patronage. He discovered Janis Joplin, shaped Whitney Houston, revived Aretha Franklin.
He was a kingmaker. And now he is gone. What remains?
A hollowed-out industry run by streaming services and data analysts. The Victorian obsessives among us will note the symmetry: as Rome fell, the great patrons vanished, and the arts declined into spectacle. Davis was not a saint.
He was a businessman. But he was a businessman with taste, and in the decadent chaos of modern pop culture, that taste feels like a relic of a more serious age. His death is not just an obituary; it is a signal.
The last mogul has left the building. The question is: who will turn the lights off?
